Ed

No, see my post about the difference between mythologies and the gospels.

Quote:

ip: As has been pointed out, historical-fiction writers like to get their background details straight, and Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate had been background details of the Gospels. Ed: Historical fiction was not invented until the 18th century, so your analogy fails. lp: Totally beside the point. I was using historical-fiction writing as an ANALOGY.

See above about how historians study ancient documents.

Quote:

Ed:They may not be a primary source but they are independent, see above. lp: However, the Gospels are not independent reports; Matthew and Luke both copied off of Mark and Q, the latter source not surviving.

Actually they are a mixture of independent sources and borrowed sources from Mark. Q may or may not have existed. John is mostly independent.

Quote:

Ed:In addition to organization there are other characteristics that differentiate life from non-life. lp: Like what?

See my post to Rimstalker listing the 7 characteristics of life.

Quote:

Ed: Louis Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation 100 years ago. LP: No, he didn't. He simply found no evidence of it happening under certain carefully-controlled conditions. Ed: Thats right by carefully controlled all he did was prevent living organisms from corrupting his experiment which proved the Law of Biogenesis, ie life comes only from life. lp: How are Pasteur's experiments supposed to be absolute proof? Most research into origin-of-life conditions has involved considering conditions very different from those in Pasteur's laboratory. Pasteur was right about what he looked at, but he had not looked at everything.

I didnt say that they are absolute proof. They are just one part of the huge obstacle against abiogenesis. There are major problems with most of the origin of life scenarios.

Quote:

Rim:[the Biblical God doing wicked things...] Ed: No, morality comes from God's objective moral character. All of these people were guilty of rebelling against the king of the universe. LP: As opposed to reforming those supposedly wicked people; it makes no sense to allow something to happen and then to complain about it happening. Ed: God wants to have free will beings in his universe not automatons. So we must face the consequences of our moral choices. That is the price of freedom. lp: Allowing people to misbehave and then complaining about the results? According to the Gospels, JC had taught that parts of the body that cause trouble are to be removed; so if free will causes trouble, then it is best that it be gotten rid of.

God considers our freedom more important than the problems that allowing that freedom may cause.

Ed

My assumptions are very simple, the Laws of Logic work. This has been the basic of assumption of scientists for 800 years.

Quote:

Ed: My knowledge comes from those books I mention above. Actually many zoologists and brain experts claim to know even more than I have mentioned but some of their claims I don't think are supported by the evidence. Dat: Name the books, find the websites, show the evidence. I'm just tired of vague references to authority.

I'll try.

Quote:

Ed: Well if they do possess abstract reasoning they sure don't use it. Have you ever owned a dog? I have, and you quickly learn what their intellectual limitations are. DAt: My sister has owned a cat, and I have played with dogs all my life. You may think that dogs are intellectually bankrupt from lack of evidence of any alternate behavior, but I can make the same argument of a very elusive God that somehow evades all our queries.

I didnt say that they were intellectually bankrupt. They just cannot reason abstractly, and they don't need to do so, they can survive just the way God made them. My statements were not invented by me, read any mainstream animal behavior book.

Quote:

Ed:There is a way to refute it. Provide empirical evidence of impersonal processes producing persons. Dat: How is that possible when the terms that define persons is obscure and being debated? You're deliberately setting the battlefield to your side and making the definitions impossible; like I said, a tautology cannot be refuted, and the statement "persons come from the personal" is indeed a tautology. But the statement that "abstract thinking beings must come from more abstract thinking beings" is not a tautology, and easily refuted by evolution. Now, argue as you will, but queries of that matter are better kept on the E&C forum anyway.

I am not referring to the process, I am referring to the ultimate cause. God could very well have used some type of evolution to produce personal beings but no form of unguided impersonal process could do so according to the law of sufficient cause.

This is the end of part I of my response.

[ January 20, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

lpetrich

I still don't see the difference. Check out the thread on Jesus Christ as a Mythic Hero in Biblical Criticism & Archeology -- Jesus Christ fits Lord Raglan's profile remarkably well. By contrast, Mohammed (for example) seems like a real person. So should we convert to Islam?

I will concede that there is much that is poorly understood in this field. But I don't think that abiogenesis has been convincingly ruled out, at least not yet.

And compared to Ed's credulity regarding the Gospels, that is choking on gnats while swallowing camels.

Synaesthesia

The earth has been around in a somewhat coherent form for about 4.5 billion years. Life has existed, as I understand it, for about 3.8. Human beings have been experimenting with self-replicating molecules for less than fifty years. That is a mere 0.000016% of the 300 million years over which early life evolved. 2% codification isn’t 2% of the proof we need, it is a resounding confirmation of some of the principles by which it appears life developed.

I think we can both agree that it is not clear right now how life on earth was produced. Naturally we are provided with little direct evidence about the pathways taken by life. However, what is possible, and what is occurring today, is that we can elucidate what KIND of reactions and what kind of chemicals would be required in order for life to form in the conditions under which it did. Despite the fact that we can’t just cook up a batch of E. coli in the space of a few hours as some creationists seem to expect, the amount of progress we have made towards understanding abiogenesis is very hard to account for if there is some principle which entails that life cannot come from non-life.

From <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-abiogenesis.html:" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-abiogenesis.html:</a>

“Unfortunately, the conditions that lead to the synthesis of sugars would poison the synthesis of purines, and vice versa. Because of this, authors have speculated that the syntheses of the two compounds were separated in space or time. While this may strike you as an ad hoc requirement, there is an excellent chemicalrationale for it: if the early Earth had a neutral, as opposed to reducing, atmosphere (the current best guess) then formaldehyde (and hence sugars) may have readily formed, but cyanide would have been quickly scavenged into other forms unsuitable for purine biosynthesis. However, cyanide (and purines) would likely have entered the prebiotic environment in two other ways: first, from comets, which have been shown to be rich in cyanide(s). A huge amount of organic material, possibly as much as was created by atmospheric chemistry, was delivered to the Earth during the time preceding abiogenesis. It is likely that the kinetic energy of comet entry would have led to the synthesis of a variety of compounds, including purines, from stored cyanide. Second, besides the atmosphere and comets, the other primary center for the synthesis organic compounds was deep sea hydrothermal vents. Here the chemistry was likely much more suitable for the synthesis of purines from cyanide than in the atmosphere. Thus, we have the synthesis of sugars in the atmosphere and upper reaches of the ocean, and the synthesis of purines during the impact of comets and in the lower reaches of the ocean: as hypothesized, separation in space and time. “

By the way, I suggest you take a look at the rest of that URL. It not only

Obviously we cannot expect to produce the sheer volume of chemicals reacting on the early earth, let alone keep these reactions going on anywhere near the scale sufficient to produce primitive cellular life. What we can do and what we do, is examine the various components of life and see what kind of processes could have produced them. The fact is, although we have of course not synthesized living systems from scratch, we do know how self-replicating processes can initiate, how membranes can form and how metabolic systems can develop.


There are most certainly cases, indeed a sizable percentage of “AI” is dedicated to specialist systems. They are designed only to be able to learn and deal with a microdomain which has pre-set representations of the problems involved. Since the fact of the matter is that 90% of most human problems is about how to go about perceiving a problem, these systems model, at best, a very limited aspect of human intelligence. In terms of flexibility, today’s computers leave a lot to be desired but there is no obstacle in principle to making computer architectures as flexible as that of a human brain.

Although computer architectures today are generally quite rigid, unavoidably they do things that we don’t want them to do. Jim’s name wasn’t meant to do very much, it wasn’t state o’ the art, but there were very important and totally unforseen side-effects.

What I am saying is that although computers and computer software are manufactured what computers and software DO, malfunctions and features alike, are very often unintentional. Similarly, in nature we directly observe random mutations producing functionality in biological organisms. Your informatic version of vitalism has been falsified, functionality is not necessarily designed.

Well of course the game runs on rules. That is what it has specifically been designed to do. (ie. there are commands which execute specific rules.) What was found, and what the game is philosophically illustrative of, is that unforseen (by definition non-teleological) and suprisingly complex effects arise as a result of the very simple constraints and architecture of the game. Shapes drift about, some shapes will tend to destroy stable ones, others will produce shapes identical to themselves. Without design, order has been produced.

Life as we observe it is the result of natural processes which are also observed. That it’s origins have been most clarified by hypothesizing natural processes is the very opposite of magical thinking, it is the beginnings of a branch of science.

I am certainly not begging the question of natural origins, my assumption is that nature exists whether or not God created it. (one which, I daresay, you do not disagree with.) If nature came from God, jolly good, because it appears that God’s nature has blindly produced life, even if the force behind it all did anticipate what was going to happen.

As things stand, I am of course not convinced that the universe was designed for life any more than the human hand was designed for finger painting.

Oh, you misunderstand. I am not so foolish enough to think that computer viruses are intelligent (though they may exibit some very tiny portion of the features that intelligence does), my point is simply that they replicate and evolve.

Luckily, there are human technicians who help ensure that in the virtual ecology of the internet, viruses experience very strong selective pressures for non-existence.

I have an issue of scientific american with a special on self-replicating autonomatons. I’ll dig it up and find the URLs that it gives. (besides, I think I should learn a bit more about it myself.) Which reminds me how very far afield we have gone.....

Regards,
Synaesthesia

HRG

Rainbow walker:
--------------------------------------------------I don’t see how you can say in no sense are these shapes designed. The results require a computer and a program DESIGNED by Conway that incorporates rules and mathematics.

------------------------------------------------

"Designed" is not the point. The relevant issue is "designed for what?".

Neither the computer nor Conway's program were designed to produce the more sophisticated objects in Life - from glider guns and glider eaters onwards. IOW, glider guns are not designed - unless you can show that Conway had them in mind when formulating the rules for Life.

In a similar sense, Mandelbrot did not design the Mandelbrot set when he decided to investigate the asymptotic properties of the simple complex polynomial f(z)=z^2+c.

Regards,
HRG.

Ed

Well that is what I am doing. And the BB demonstrates that the universe is definitely an effect and therefore requires a cause.

Quote:

Ed: It is also impossible to directly test anything in the distant past and yet we still assume the laws of logic apply. Dat:...because it is the simpliest and most coherent explanation. Yes, we may assume that tge background radiation may have been created in some freak accident of logic some 10,000 years ago, but saying that it came from the BB, assuming that all laws are constant within the Universe, is indefinitely simplier.

"Indefinitely"? I am not sure what you mean but I will go along with most of what you say in this statement and see above about the BB.

Quote:

Ed: We cannot directly gather anything from the past either and yet we still assume logic applies. Dat: Read above. And learn to refute arguments properly. One liners usually are not adaquate in countering paragraphs of thought.

You have yet to demonstrate that it is not rational to asssume that logic is valid in areas that cannot be directly tested like outside the universe and the past.

[b] Huh? Rationality demands that effects have causes, to deny that they do is going off the end of rationality.

Jack the Bodiless

...sigh...

Ed, this is bunk. And no matter how often you repeat it, it will remain bunk. Hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang IS sufficient to produce personal beings! We now understand the key stages in sufficient detail to see how it can happen.

Therefore your statement that "no form of unguided impersonal process could do so according to the law of sufficient cause" is refuted. What you're saying is equivalent to "factories cannot produce automobiles because factories aren't mounted on wheels". A wheeled vehicle can be produced by a non-wheeled structure, just as an intelligent being can be produced by unguided evolution: to argue otherwise, you must demonstrate that the mechanism isn't up to the task, not simply declare that it's impossible just because the created entity has something that the creating mechanism lacks.

Evolution sure looks like a "suficient cause" to me.

GunnerJ

BTW, I've started an interesting companion thread to this one <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=50&t=000066" target="_blank">here</a>. Anyone is free to look it over.

LinuxPup

An appeal to "The universe just came to be..." and "Logic may not have been in effect before the big bang..." seem like cries of desperation. People who oppose the idea of a First Cause seem to be arguing not on an intellectual level, but an emotional one. To say that xians are completely irrational, and then to throw logic itself out the window in your argument is self-defeating.

As far as who this First Cause is... Could it be Allah or Brahman? I cannot say for sure... I do know that the Bible makes some claims that do jive with the whole BB/First Cause debate though. In the Bible are the claims of a beginning of space and time. That God transcends these dimensions. That God is unchangable, a quality of a being outside of time. And that the universe is undergoing continual expansion. The interesting thing about BB cosmology, is that it demands a non-physical "substance" as the cause of the universe.

GunnerJ

Hey, it's good to see someone stepping up to the plate. Welcome, LinuxPup!

I disagree. Logic, as I have shown, is a contrivence for language. Physics may be another story, though. And, as has been repeated many times, an uncaused god is no better an explaination than an uncaused Universe. But, this is something of a side-track.

I strongly disagree, and invert you sentiment: people who argue for a first cause do so becuase of an emotional need for their existence to be made somehow "special" by the work of an all-powerful, all-loving being. You have to be very dispassionate in order to honestly say that no one knows why the Universe is, and that it may in fact have no reason for being here.

I'd like to see where someone has "thrown logic out the window." As has been said, speculating about events outside our possible observational boundries and using a contrived set of rules for descriptive language to do so is the ultimate illogic. But I think other posters here have a better grip on this issue.

Ah, now we're at the meat of the argument! I will assume, for the sake of argument a First Cause for the Universe. Let's evaluate these claims that it is the Xian god:

And, as I have already pointed out, that's about it. This is far from unique, too.

I disagree entirely, and have given reasons in my volleys with Ed why the Bible does not talk about a tracendant god. Some scriptural reference from you would be nice, and I will shortly add my own.

I not only dispute these claims on Biblical grounds, I challenge their relevance. Why must a First Cause for the Universe be immutable and timeless?

Where, exaclty, does the Bible mention this?

This is demonstratably false. There is no requirement in BB cosmology for any cause at all.

I look forward to your response.